Red winter

Chapter IV

At 11 am, the church bells tolled in honor of the deceased, a thin layer of snow covered the landscape. To the sound of lamentations, prayers, cries and the bells of the belfry, Ivan Tharmir was veiled and from there he would be taken to his homeland to be buried. Despite the funereal atmosphere of everyone involved in the intervention plans, it was necessary that the planning continue, after all, there were few details missing as to what should be done after the success, or failure, of the intervention, this would take another three or four days and if it would close at the grand ball, where it would be officially announced to the respective governments, but nothing publicly.

At the request of the secret service, I was charged with warning of the risk we were running in the face of Mr. Tharmir's death, or rather, the communist threat. It would probably generate fear and a request to bring forward the end of the negotiations and even the total cancellation of the plan, but the idea was to go until the end, so it falls to me to warn of the danger and ask that more care be taken with security.

"Gentlemen, I think you are all aware of the recent misfortune" I began. "At the request of the Kaiser's secret intelligence service, I must issue an alert and make a request to you, something that should influence the course of this operation" everyone was already looking at me attentively, the only sound that could be heard was my voice and the sound of fire in the fireplace.

"We are under attack, it was discovered that communist spies are probing some members of this project, one of them was the late Ivan Tharmir. We have evidence that leads us to believe that there are more targets, so I ask that you double your individual security" at that moment the doors burst open and a desperate man enters.

A man, dressed in the uniform of the royal guard, visibly frightened, with an expression of horror on his face and with eyes wide open, his hands shaking, announced in a broken voice: "Mr. Gabra was executed on his way here." Silence, despair, then the storm and chaos.

Felipe Gabra had been shot in middle of the street on his way to the Palace, he usually walked. According to witnesses, he was shot by submachine guns from a car that left at high speed after Mr. Gabra fell dead to the ground. Felipe Gabra was executed.

After the initial reception of the news with absolute silence and wide eyes, there was a murmur that evolved into a great chatter and then men got up and collected their papers in total uproar, then, chaos.

"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" I exclaimed "We need to remain calm. Gentlemen, please!" I finally got the majority's silence and attention "We are extremely close to finishing our work here, we can't stop when we get this far after weeks of work".

"We need to finish our work, if we double the security and avoid public places for long moments, everyone will come out alive and then we can celebrate our success at a ball" I finalized, most had sat down again, apparently calmer, there was murmirius and bludgers of head. I had earned their trust.

It was a long two weeks of work, meetings, discussions and an infinity of papers, the purest bureaucracy. but the work had been completed. The only fatality recorded was a member of the Royal Guard who defended with great heroism the diplomat Dmitry Konstantinovich, of course, he hears arrests of spies and communists, but none was the one who attacked me in the theater.